US ups pressure on Pakistan

WASHINGTON: The administration of US President Barack Obama has demanded the identities of some of the top Pakistani intelligence operatives as the US tries to determine whether any of them had contact with Osama Bin Laden, according to The New York Times.
The newspaper said members of the US administration had expressed deep frustration with the Pakistani military and intelligence for their refusal to identify members of the agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate, who were believed to have close ties with Bin Laden.
In particular, US officials have demanded information on what is known as the ISI’s directorate, which has worked closely with militants since the days of the fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, the report said.
Pakistani investigators involved in piecing together Bin Laden’s life during the past nine years said this week that he had been living in Pakistan’s urban centers longer than previously believed,” the paper said.
Two Pakistani officials say that Bin Laden’s Yemeni wife told investigators that before moving in 2005 to the mansion in Abbottabad, Bin Laden had lived with his family for nearly two and a half years in a small village, Chak Shah Mohammad, a little more than a mile southeast of the town of Haripur, on the main Abbottabad highway, The Times said. One of the officials said this means that Bin Laden left Pakistan’s rugged tribal region sometime in 2003 and had been living in northern urban regions since then, the report noted.
President Barack Obama’s promised trip to Pakistan this year, once seen as a reward for a key ally in the fight against terrorism, is now a looming headache for the White House as it tries to determine whether the government in Islamabad was complicit in allowing Bin Laden to live for years within the country’s borders.
Obama told Pakistani officials in the fall that he planned to travel there in 2011, in part to soothe concerns that the president was favoring Pakistan’s neighbor and archrival, India, by visiting there first. White House spokesmen questioned this week refused to say whether Obama still planned to go.
The compound in Pakistan where US forces killed Bin Laden was an “active command and control center” where the Al-Qaeda leader retained strategic, operational and tactical direction of the group, a senior US intelligence official said on Saturday.
“This compound in Abbottabad was an active command and control center for Al-Qaeda’s top leader and it’s clear … that he was not just a strategic thinker for the group,” the official said. “He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions.
”The official released five video clips of Bin Laden taken from the compound, most of them showing the Al-Qaeda leader evidently rehearsing for some of the videotape messages he occasionally distributed to his followers.
One video segment, however, showed a gray-bearded Bin Laden wrapped in a blanket and wearing a ski cap while reviewing video images of himself in different settings. It was not clear where the videos had been taped, but an initial assessment indicated one clip in front of an armoire may have been recorded at the compound.
“The materials reviewed over the past several days clearly show that Bin Laden remained an active leader in Al-Qaeda, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group,” the official said. “He was far from a figurehead. He was an active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our nation’s security.”